“I entreat your Holiness to see that no one, whatever law or government he may live under, should dare to contradict the teaching about the Immaculate Conception, since from it so much good comes for the service of the Lord.” - Queen Isabel in a letter to Pope Alexander VI370 years before the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was declared, Isabel co-founded in 1484 the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception with her friend St. Beatriz de Silva. The order is still thriving today.
Isabel was clear that much good would come from trust in the Immaculate Conception. In 1984 Pope John Paul II consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of Christ, responding to Mary's prophetic words at Fatima (feast day yesterday): “The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world”.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the Communist regime in Russia survived "not because there has not been any struggle against it from the inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West." Evil must be fought on the supernatural as well as on the natural level.
[Image: The Immaculate Conception by Murillo, Spain, 1680. Now at the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg]
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